There’s a simple solution to the contradiction eating
away at the heart of the GOP. Disband and secede to enclaves reserved
exclusively for the extremely rich.
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| A Republican Enclave, recently |
The Republican Party
convention in Tampa this week has mined comical new depths of inane, conceptually
bankrupt rhetoric, even by the already desperate standards set during George
Bush’s government, which managed the impressive task of staying in power for
eight years without passing a single act that genuinely improved life for the majority
of people living in the United States. The folksy Florida theme of the week has
been as simple as saying “Pray to God and all good things shall come to thee”.
Speaker after speaker has claimed to come from ornery, humble roots, but thanks
to hard work they ended up successful and, by proxy, stinking rich. And if
everyone else just works as hard as these leading model Republicans, they’ll end
up exactly the same, and America will be saved from the hardline socialists
apparently rife throughout the Democratic Party (nope, I can’t name a single
one either).
The contradiction at
the core of what can barely be called a Republican ‘philosophy’ is that all
this apparent success was achieved without help or handouts from the state (this
in itself is a lie comprehensively nailed here by Charles Pierce). And yet,
while denouncing big government, it wants to be the Party that governs all 50
states. How can that be done on a small scale? The answer, as all latter-day GOP
administrations have discovered, is that it cannot. But there’s no need to let
reality stop you posturing in the name of a phony but populist grassroots core
belief.
In order to bring
some genuine principle back to a Party so heartbreakingly starved of integrity,
the Republicans should renounce its goal of being elected to political power
and liquidate itself with immediate effect. In return for this magnanimous
gesture, the
